Читать книгу The Coming of the American Behemoth - Michael Joseph Roberto - Страница 12

3—The Spectacle of Prosperity and Necessity of Spin

THE GREAT BOOM of the 1920s created a spectacle of prosperity based on America’s extraordinary capacities as the epicenter of the world capitalist system. Economic growth between 1922 and 1929 was unprecedented, at times breathtaking, and incessantly transformative. Much of what remained of traditional nineteenth-century American society was swept aside in a whirlwind of change. The once vital role of the petty-bourgeois merchant and small family farmer was fading into history. Capitalist innovation in the means of production seemed to ensure the promise of endless prosperity in the New Era. Mass production, urbanization, and the impact of the automobile and the radio were redoing the physical and mental landscape. Socially mobile Americans, especially those in the rising boomtowns, found pleasure in the swirl of products that seemingly made life more exciting and vivid. The dazzle of it all was reflected in a new obsession with fashions, sports, movies, music, and booze. The businessman was the new American hero, even Christ-like. There was so much ado in the constant movement of things and people that one could be easily lured by the mysterious powers of the commodity. As Marx and Engels first described the sweeping powers of industrial capitalism:

Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that had conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.¹

In 1920s America, the capitalist spell had become so intoxicating that millions of Americans believed they were living as individuals never had before. Many more held out the hope that their turn would come. Indeed, a new, more enjoyable lifestyle was enough to convince some that capitalism had changed in a revolutionary way by becoming what it was always supposed to be: democratic.

But to sustain the boom required just the opposite. The First World War had turned the capitalist road into a highway. The partnership of government, business, and labor required for wartime production had expanded the force field within which capital could accumulate. State intervention into the private economy was welcomed by Big Business, making both even stronger in the postwar decade as a more powerful form of capitalist rule emerged. The requirements of capitalist accumulation only furthered the concentration of wealth and centralization of Big Business, its power expanding over the rest of society in ever-totalizing forms. From a capitalist state compelled to raise production and productivity to construct the war machine while still providing maximum profits to capitalists, the U.S. government became the manager for plutocracy that was making business all-powerful in its own right. The conscious aim of three Republican presidents was to promote a policy of laissez-faire in domestic and foreign policies that belied the potential might of a capitalist empire on the rise.

The Great Boom established the basis for a belief in the possibility of abundance, endless prosperity, and the promise of a qualitative advance in material comfort for all Americans. Delivering it was another matter. The extraordinary development of technology and innovation in management caused the fixed component of constant capital, machinery, to rise at the expense of its variable constituent, labor. This meant that production would inevitably deliver far more goods than the mass of people could consume. Without any consideration of this and other contradictions, capitalist leadership quickly became convinced that prosperity required the selling of ideas as well as things. In the marketplace of the New Era, it became as important to constantly remind the consumer that he or she needed a new car, radio, household appliance, or mouthwash as it was to make any of them. While the creation of material abundance on a hitherto unknown scale was indeed a remarkable feat, the more enduring achievement of the American capitalists was the genesis of marketing as an industry unto itself. For the first time, capitalist development came to depend on the means and methods of persuasion and manipulation to sustain capitalist accumulation. In the American epicenter of world capitalism where abundance was the greatest and living standards were envied by the rest of the world, the mission of capital was not only to subject labor to its command but to extend its domination in the realm of mass consciousness. It is here where the market mentality prevailed, where consumerism triumphed over citizenship, and where non-terrorist fascist processes based on persuasion, deception, and manipulation aimed at the domination of capital itself were forged.

When war erupted in Europe in 1914, America was considered a backward society by haughty Europeans of high culture. Jonathan Norton Leonard, a writer whose 1939 book Three Years Down offered a highly readable account of the worst years of the Great Depression, described the United States in 1914 as “large and rich” but “a provincial country and none too sure of itself.” Americans in pursuit of quality higher education and who wanted to become doctors, scientists, or philosophers went to German universities. “Paris ruled the elegancies,” while “‘the latest thing’ in every field was usually of European origin.” Before the First World War, Leonard wrote, Americans “were definitely importers of culture, not exporters of our own.” He added:

Our technical progress was not much considered. Our movies, comic strips, popular music and fashions had not yet begun to Americanize the leisure moments of the world. Our financiers, except when they wanted to borrow money abroad, were completely wrapped up in domestic affairs. Our foreign policy, except for a habit of absent-minded felony toward Latin America, did not exist. Our navy was an expensive gesture and our army a small, hairy-chested farce.²

The coming of the Great War changed all that as the United States became a global leader whose many powers seemed magical.

THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF THE GREAT BOOM

Of all the changes in the international capitalist order following the First World War, the most significant was the emergence of the United States as “the great creditor nation of the world.”³ This underscores what William Leuchtenburg, a highly respected American historian of the 1920s and 1930s, meant when he declared that America’s postwar global role was one “of those great shifts in power that occurs but rarely in the history of nations, a transition with formidable consequences.”⁴ Even before it entered the conflict in 1917, its massive economic potential, tapped by the needs of total war in Europe, had put it on that path. From 1914 to 1916, U.S. trade with the Allies rose from $825 million to $3.2 billion.⁵ By the time American troops arrived on the Western Front, total exports of U.S. merchandise to the Allies had reached $6.2 billion, about 11 percent of GNP.⁶ The more strategically placed enterprises reeled in the biggest catches; for example, United States Steel’s profits rose from $76 million in 1914 to $478 million in 1917.⁷ National income nearly doubled from 1914 to 1918, as living standards improved dramatically for millions of Americans employed in wartime production and services. The war also made America the world’s leading energy producer. By 1920, its 60 million tons of oil production was two-thirds of the world’s total.⁸

Globally, America took a decisive step in ascending to the level of a preponderant economic power, making real President Woodrow Wilson’s desire for an active and engaging postwar U.S. foreign policy that would facilitate an “open door” for American goods around the world. The Marxist economist Lewis Corey in 1934 emphasized that the most important result of the war was America’s ascendance at the expense of its competitors. In 1919–1920, U.S. exports reached $16.1 billion, the highest to date; exports exceeded imports by almost $7 billion.⁹ Moreover, the United States, as the world’s new banker, exported more capital than ever before. By 1919, foreigners owed American investors almost $3 billion, not including the more than $10 billion the United States had lent foreign countries, mainly the Allies, to remain in the war.¹⁰ Indeed, when the fighting stopped, America was positioned to exert tremendous economic and political power throughout the world, though the “reluctant giant” failed to do so in the coming decades, at least to the degree required given its new global role.¹¹

All this startling growth was the result of a historic partnership joined by Big Business and the U.S. government that was designed to produce whatever the Allies needed. At President Wilson’s urging, Congress passed the Military Appropriations Act in August 1916, from which came a Council of National Defense. Cabinet members sat on the council, but its main work was done by business leaders. America’s entry into the war the following year led to the creation of the War Industries Board. Other new agencies quickly followed, for example, the Food, Fuel and Railway Administrations, the Shipping Board, the War Trade Board, and the Selective Service Administration. All were needed by the federal government to coordinate production, prices, and labor for the purpose of establishing an effective wartime economy. The waging of imperialist war had made planning a necessity in the workings of capitalist production and exchange. Of course, none of this hurt Big Business. For the first time in the history of capitalism, the state became a highly conscious and informed manager of business interests. Some other wartime European governments had moved in this direction but none as far as the United States in achieving a new benchmark for state power.

Meanwhile, organized labor argued that its commitment to wartime production had earned it a rightful place at the decision-making table with employers and politicians. The AFL contended that business and government needed to take stock of its longtime commitment to reformism and also recognize the hard line it had taken against the IWW. Moreover, its ability to keep workers in line with concessions for higher wages and better working conditions had helped to dampen sentiments for strikes and walkouts. The fact that wartime prosperity had found its way downward to parts of the working class, especially those engaged in war-related production, had raised wages and levels of comfort and security. Nevertheless, whatever gains workers received were undermined by the deepening compromise struck between Samuel Gompers and other AFL leadership with Big Business. The ideological disposition of the AFL could not be clearer. In its deliberate aim to reject any hint of socialism, it sought harmonious relations with capital in the hope that it would lead American workers to become partners with business.¹²

Here were the combined forces at home—government, business, and labor—that turned the United States into a preponderant global power by war’s end. This required a foreign policy to open doors for the export of American capital and goods, though the main intent of economic planners and strategists was for the door to swing outward. As mentioned, exports exceeded imports in the billions. The export of American capital also soared to new heights as leading businessmen saw profitable opportunities to invest their capital reserves in underdeveloped areas of the world economy, especially in Latin America. The creation of the American International Corporation in 1915, which included some of the largest U.S. companies and banks, facilitated such investment.¹³ By 1918, U.S. banks had established branches in sixteen European and Latin American countries, and the rise of their leadership of the capitalist world coincided with New York replacing London as the world’s financial center. That the war had qualitatively advanced the global reach of the American empire at the expense of European capitalist countries was clear to capitalists and communists alike. Even as early as 1915, Thomas W. Lamont of J. P. Morgan and Company gleefully noted that the increase in war business had greatly swung America’s trade balance in its favor, enabling American capitalists to buy back U.S. securities from foreign concerns, which eliminated the drain on foreign exchange. Instead of paying interest and dividends to foreigners, American investors were now the recipients. Nine years later, the Soviet economist E. A. Preobrazhensky saw this even more clearly by connecting America’s imperial rise to the dollar as the new, dominant currency in the global capitalist system.¹⁴

Nevertheless, the contradictions of wartime capitalist enterprise ushered in a sharp recession not long after the Armistice was signed in November 1918. Government subsidies had resulted in a combination of huge surpluses in agricultural and manufacturing goods, highly profitable investments, and price inflation. But the coming of peace brought their abrupt end. As the War Department quickly canceled nearly half of its $6 billion in outstanding contracts, the federal government drastically cut overall spending in fiscal year 1919 from $18 billion to $6 billion. Domestic markets already saturated with product were additionally burdened by the relatively quick recovery throughout much of Europe, which only added to the excess. The result was an immediate slowdown in American production across the board. Total industrial output fell by one-third. As inventories piled up, prices nosedived. By 1921, wholesale prices had dropped by 37 percent, with key farm products the lowest. Investments in new factories and machinery declined precipitously, causing unemployment to rise sharply as the decline in demand for industrial workers was made worse with the decommissioning of nearly four million servicemen returning home in search of work.¹⁵ As great as war had been for American capitalism, the coming of peace brought just the opposite.

THE GREAT BOOM

The postwar downturn did not last long. As Lewis Corey would explain, a normal process of general liquidation of prices, wages, and accumulated goods quickly wiped out fixed capital. Eliminating the disproportionate accumulations of capital and goods that had caused the downturn then made possible a new phase of accumulation based on rising demand for consumer goods. Corey likened the process to “the blood-letting of medieval medicine.” The point at which the bleeding weakened the patient, who then required the first of several transfusions to regain his vigor, resembled the beginning of recovery as consumer demand rose again. But here, Corey argued, was the real challenge for leading capitalists. To satisfy rising demand for consumer goods required renewed investment in capital goods to replace equipment in old industries or for use in new industries. As Corey said, “The speed of revival and the scope of recovery and prosperity depend upon an increasing output of capital goods and the opportunities it provides for capital investment and accumulation.” On this basis industry revived and wages rose, giving workers more purchasing power. The recovery that began in 1922 set the stage for the New Era of prosperity to come, though it never would deliver its promise of uninterrupted prosperity and universal wealth.¹⁶

Yet, the aggregate numbers gave full force to those who were trumpeting its arrival. GNP climbed from $74 billion to $104 billion from the beginning of the recovery in 1921 to the stock market crash in October 1929.¹⁷ In the same period, the output of all manufactures rose 64 percent, though there were wide variations of growth within the industrial complex; for example, the petroleum and coal products industry topped all other producers with a gain of 156 percent.¹⁸ Electric motors rapidly replaced steam engines; by 1927, 70 percent of American industry was electrified.¹⁹ Automobiles and electrification, the twin pillars of growth and prosperity, fueled tremendous expansion beyond the cities with new highways that connected urban centers with new areas of concentric growth, the suburbs. By 1929, there were 26.7 million autos in use, one for every 4.6 Americans. As the automobile revolutionized transportation and redefined social existence, a range of new household appliances rolled off the assembly lines in record numbers.²⁰ Inside the home, life became more manageable, comfortable, and leisurely. The percentage of households with flush lavatories more than doubled between 1920 and 1930, while the number of homes with radios went from zero to 40 percent. Cheap electricity facilitated new appliances that made cooking and cleaning less burdensome.²¹ From this remarkable surge in economic growth emerged a culture of mass consumption based on increasing purchasing power. Total U.S. income rose from $67.9 billion in 1923 to $82.4 billion in 1929, an increase of 21 percent.²²

By any measure, overall economic growth between 1922 and 1929 was phenomenal. But what was behind it? Writing from the vantage point of the Depression in 1934, Corey explained that the prosperity during those years depended on rising opportunities for capital accumulation, which ultimately depended on sustaining investment and output of capital goods. This, in turn, required that the goods produced for consumers would continue selling at profitable levels. But there was a caveat. As long as sales of consumer goods kept pace with the investment and output of capital goods, capitalist accumulation would proceed on a generally upward path. On this basis, new construction (mainly commercial and industrial building) played a major role in fueling the boom, rising 31 percent. Equally important, the wholesale value of automobile output averaged over $3 billion yearly. Then again, integral to the expansion of capital goods was increasing productivity that provided more impetus for capitalists to invest in new industrial machinery and electrification. Investment in electric machinery more than doubled. Large amounts of capital were also absorbed in investment aimed at technological innovation, such as radios, motion pictures, rayon, chemicals, aviation, mechanical refrigeration, and the power laundry. All this activity came full circle to more construction of industrial and commercial structures, from factories to movie palaces to service stations. As Corey noted, the expansion of new or relatively new industries was especially significant because it required greater levels of capital investment than similar expansion in older industries.²³

Driving all this was the capitalist imperative to continuously expand production, increase productivity, and create a standard of wages based on factory discipline that turned workers into consumers. Two ways to achieve these ends lay in the systematic organization of mass production and a “scientific” approach to industrial management. The first, known as Fordism because it flowed from the pioneering approach to auto production by Henry Ford, involved the division of assembly-line processes performed by workers engaged in successive stages of the manufacturing process. Based on the rational use of labor operating in systemic cohesion, production became as interchangeable as the different parts of the commodities produced, and like the parts just as easy to replace.²⁴ But Fordism established more than a new organization of work. It was also, as the historian Michel Beaud succinctly described it,

a new model for producing the capitalist commodity (with relatively high wages for a fraction of the working class, and a strong increase in productivity due to mass production and rationalization), and a new model for realizing the value thus created (with development of mass consumption, which spread to part of the working class, whose conditions of living approached those of the middle strata).

No one saw this more clearly than Ford himself, whose managers systematized production by stationing workers on the assembly line, because, as Ford noted, “walking is not a remunerative activity” and because even the “most stupid man” could learn his one defined task in a couple of days. In 1926, 79 percent of the workers in all of Ford’s factories went through less than a week of training. But for this level of skill, Ford began paying his workers $5 per day and lowered the working day from nine to eight hours. The daily wage continued to go up, to $6 in 1919 and $7 in 1929.²⁵

As Fordism became the norm in mass production, industrialists recognized the need for a more disciplined worker who had a better grasp of the job and therefore was more capable of adhering to the dictates of “scientific management.” This approach, according to the historian Tom Kemp, was implicit in the ideas of “Taylorism,” which sought to give management undisputed control over the workplace and consequently the leverage it believed it needed to mitigate the influence of unions and the tendency of workers to control their own labor processes. According to Kemp, these efforts did not entirely succeed. “Workers did not give up trying to enforce their concept of work.”²⁶

The benefits derived from these rational approaches to production made U.S. corporations like Ford, DuPont, and General Electric global models of capitalist enterprise. Turning the least skilled worker into a highly efficient cog in the wheels of production was no mean accomplishment, especially if it justified paying higher wages just so the worker could buy what he made. In the end, however, industrial capitalist ownership reaped the benefits of rising productivity. According to George Soule, output per man-hour in industrial production grew 32 percent from 1923 to 1929, which resulted in lower labor costs but not higher wages. Instead, for much of the decade, the biggest rise in income from productivity increases went to stockholders, whose dividends rose to 65 percent by 1929.²⁷ The rich got richer. But the disparity carried ominous consequences for the future, though hardly anyone cared.

Meanwhile, U.S. capitalism pumped out capital and consumer goods at unprecedented levels. Rising exports created a big trade surplus. U.S foreign investment rose dramatically. By 1929, U.S. industry was producing one-quarter of the world’s goods and 40 percent of all manufactured items.²⁸ Exports increased from $3.9 billion to almost $5.4 billion from 1922 to 1929, as U.S. companies went beyond their traditional European markets to Africa and South America where the increase was roughly 130 percent. Imports also grew from $3.2 billion to $4.5 billion. By and large, the figures show an impressive trade surplus and balance of payments.²⁹

SALESMANSHIP AND ADVERTISING IN THE SPECTACLE OF ABUNDANCE

If the volume of goods produced by American capitalists between 1922 and 1929 was unprecedented, so was the means by which it was marketed. No longer was it sufficient to present an item for sale, promote its usefulness, and then take the order. Salesmen going door to door needed thinkers back in the office, whose mission was to determine how to persuade the consumer to buy even if the item was not needed just so the bosses could stay ahead of the constant worry of too much product in backroom storage or the large warehouse. Market imperatives to sustain profits required a qualitatively new approach. As never before, wrote journalist Frederick Lewis Allen in 1931, business in the 1920s had recognized that continuous prosperity depended on the consumer “to buy and buy lavishly”:

The whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super-heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts, and electric ice-boxes would be dammed at its outlet. The salesman and the advertising man held the key to this outlet. As competition increased their methods became more strenuous. No longer was it considered enough to recommend one’s goods in modest and explicit terms and to place them on the counter in the hope that the ultimate consumer would make up his mind to purchase. The advertiser must plan elaborate national campaigns, consult with psychologists, and employ all the eloquence of poets to cajole, exhort, or intimidate the consumer into buying,—“to break down consumer resistance.”³⁰

For the salesmen—women were conspicuously absent from their growing ranks—this meant big changes. For one thing, salesmanship now depended on a growing arsenal of marketing tools, from neon signs to slick deliveries aimed at manipulating consumer needs. Psychologists took care of that. Salesmen learned to sell themselves more effectively so they could sell more product. Gadgets and mind-altering messages aimed at convincing the consumer to buy things that made his or her life easier, or to make them more personally appealing, or to make an ordinary man feel like a millionaire altered the mind of the salesman as well. To sell the commodity by selling himself made him a model citizen whose thinking and existence, his self-identity, was supposed to mirror the ideal market he lived for and sustained.

Such was the world of George F. Babbitt, the eponymous protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 satirical novel whose daily existence as the consummate salesman was as packaged as the world of commodities surrounding him. A real-estate broker who lived and worked in the fictitious midwestern city of Zenith—the literary counterpart to Warren Harding’s hometown of Marion, Ohio—Babbitt awoke each morning at precisely 7:20 to “the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial.” As a respected businessman in the city, Babbitt lived up to the virtues of his trade “as the servant of society,” finding homes for families and shops for businessmen by demonstrating “steadiness and diligence.” He was honest, experienced in the matters of titles and leases, and had “an excellent memory for prices.” For Babbitt, this was the bottom line. No matter if “his eventual importance to mankind was perhaps lessened by his large and complacent ignorance of all architecture save the types of houses turned out by speculative builders.”³¹ For Babbitt serenely believed that

the one purpose of the real-estate business was to make money for George F. Babbitt. True, it was a good advertisement at Boosters’ Club lunches, and all the varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to speak sonorously of Unselfish Public Service, the Broker’s Obligation to Keep Inviolate the Trust of His Clients, and a thing called Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-Class Realtor and if you hadn’t you were a shyster, a piker, and a fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you to handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn’t imply that you were to be impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn’t jew you down on the asking-price.³²

For Stuart Ewen, who has written masterfully on the history of public relations in the United States, George Babbitt was the ultimate foot-soldier of the New Capitalism.³³ But he was also its product, as Sinclair Lewis recognized at the time:

Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.³⁴

Babbitt’s character was molded in a totalizing marketplace that took root at a time when business trumped politics, businessmen replaced statesmen, and the consumer replaced the citizen. “Business itself was regarded with a new veneration,” observed the writer and longtime Harper’s magazine editor Frederick Lewis Allen. While the public’s interest in politics at all levels vanished, the growth of the Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions clubs in cities and towns across the country was astounding. In their weekly meetings, members never ceased to praise the “redemptive and regenerative influence of business.” The businessman was idolized as “a builder, a doer of great things, yes, and a dreamer whose imagination was ever seeking out new ways of serving humanity.”³⁵ Salesmen and advertisers were the “agents and evangels” of capitalist enterprise.³⁶

If it took a novelist like Sinclair Lewis to make Babbitt the archetypal salesman, it was the ad writer and executive Bruce Barton who made Jesus the conqueror of the business world. In his 1925 book The Man Nobody Knows, Barton introduced the Nazarene as the creator of modern business enterprise for having “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.” To do this required methods that any sound corporate leader would follow. “To create any sort of reception for a new idea or product to-day involves a vast machinery of propaganda and expense,” Barton wrote. “Jesus had no funds and no machinery. His organization was a tiny group of uneducated men, one of whom had already abandoned the cause as hopeless, deserting to the enemy.”³⁷ The key to his success was selling the gospel and this, Barton said, showed no offense to the faith:

Surely no one will consider us lacking in reverence if we say that every one of the “principles of modern salesmanship” on which business men so much pride themselves, are brilliantly exemplified in Jesus’ talk and work. The first of these and perhaps the most important is the necessity for “putting yourself in step with your prospect.”³⁸

To this end, all of Jesus’s parables were “the most powerful advertisements of all time” and “show how instantly he won his audiences.”³⁹

In striking contrast to Christians who pondered the Second Coming as a moment of justice and redemption, Barton claimed that Jesus’s presence was ubiquitous in the Great Boom. Look around, he urged his readers, and you will understand who the real Jesus was in his own day, a sociable and unpretentious fellow more likely to be found in the marketplace rather than at Sunday services and, consequently, “the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem.”⁴⁰ Make no mistake! He was the Founder of Modern Business and the first modern executive who commanded others through personal magnetism to demonstrate how to handle flawed followers with infinite patience. He lived the life of service, and this was his ultimate message to the businessman. “We are great because of our service,” as Barton interpreted the parables. His message to the working man: “We will crawl under your car oftener and get our backs dirtier than any of our competitors.” For owners, there was something different. “We put ourselves at your feet and give you everything that you can possibly demand.” No matter what they manufactured, all owners made the same pitch. “Service is what we are here for.” According to Barton, what business leaders were doing had been done by Jesus almost two thousand years ago. Service was central to the “business philosophy” pioneered by Jesus.⁴¹

Barton was already a highly successful Madison Avenue executive and a partner in the agency that handled much of the advertising for General Electric and General Motors.⁴² The Man Nobody Knows instantly became a bestseller. Oddly enough, it placed fourth in total sales for a work of nonfiction in 1925 and first in 1926. Given its eighty-week run on the bestseller list in Publisher’s Weekly, the book was a bigger seller during those two years than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, considered a hallmark of American literature.⁴³ Part of the successful run was due to Barton’s own promotion of the book, asking ministers to use it in Sunday school classes and suggesting to employers that they give a copy to each of their ten most valuable employees for Christmas. Some did. Among others, an executive of the National Mazda Lamp Company in Detroit gave a copy to each of his 125 invited dinner guests. Barton’s success further advanced his career in advertising.⁴⁴ Perhaps his crowning moment in the business came when he became an adviser to Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, who sought Barton’s help in his run for the presidency.⁴⁵

In a chapter of his 1938 study of the American capitalist economy, John Blair explained how advertising had become central to what he termed the “distributory function” of the national economy. Blair considered not only the spectacular material contributions advertising had made but also the extent to which its functional role had generated conditions which, in theory, created laws and principles governing its operation. Proof was in the numbers. From 1914 to 1929, money spent on advertising in newspapers and magazines rose from $256 million to $1.1 billion. The spending pace quickened in the late 1920s. Newspaper advertising rose from $220 million in 1925 to $260 million in 1929, an increase of over 18 percent, with about the same rate in magazines. This caused Blair to also consider that the material gain that made advertising integral to capitalist enterprise constituted a “law” or “principle.”⁴⁶ As he explained:

In substance the idea embodied in this “law” is merely that as more and more advertising is utilized to sell a certain product to the consumer, the consumer himself becomes more and more immune to that advertising. That is to say, he develops a sort of psychological shell against the forces of advertising. To break through this shell more and more advertising must be utilized, which, in turn, means that the shell becomes all the harder to crack. And so it goes; more and more advertising means a tougher shell which brings forth more and more advertising which means an even tougher shell … ad infinitum.

As Blair saw it, every ad aimed at selling a product might lead to a successful sale but in the process the consumer becomes jaded, which then calls for a more appealing ad for further sales of that product. While the objective of selling the product was met, the jaded consumer posed a greater challenge because his “psychological shell” had been hardened. In this sense, the “law” or “principle” of advertising reflected the general law of capitalist accumulation. Every new gain or victory set a new benchmark for further success.⁴⁷

Behind the power of advertising was an even more formidable bulwark of corporate capitalism: the rising complex of public relations and its experts, whose practices and planned propaganda campaigns, writes Stuart Ewen, “grew exponentially” during the 1920s and generated “foundational changes in the American social fabric.” Among others, Ewen cites the work of Harold Laswell, a political scientist and leading expert on the subject who noted that propaganda had quickly become “one of the most powerful instrumentalities in the modern world” aimed at controlling public opinion by means of conscious manipulation. Relying on various forms of social communication—symbols, stories, rumors, reports, pictures, etc.—public relations had given rise to what Laswell termed “a dictatorial habit of mind” in the public domain. This, Ewen writes, was cultivated further by means of an “increasingly sophisticated opinion-molding apparatus” that included the use of polling.⁴⁸ “By the end of the decade,” Ewen says, “the study of public attitudes was moving beyond the concerns of advertising and marketing per se, to inform a more comprehensive approach to corporate thinking.”⁴⁹ For Ewen, public relations experts who gathered information by means of conscious, steady polling served to transform the public itself into a “commodity” by packaging and selling its opinions to “the highest bidder.”⁵⁰

Here perhaps were the true revolutionaries of the New Era. Decades before Pax Americana established its hegemony over the world market, American capitalists were using material abundance as the basis for colonizing the minds of their citizens. The monumental altering and transforming of consciousness required to sustain mass consumption had created a spectacle of abundance that radiated through the magic of advertising. John Blair saw this in the revolutionary power of the advertiser to seize control of the senses. “At night,” he wrote, “we find the streets of any metropolitan area alive with ingenious electrical signs of one type or another, evolving pictures of wheels turning around, small automobiles flashing continuously across the facade of a building, arrows pointing at something or other.”⁵¹ But as Blair believed, the dazzling and mesmerizing spectacle had always to be enhanced in order to penetrate the consumer’s jaded psychological shell.

Another observer, from France, who saw the same powers at work was the writer and cultural critic George Duhamel, who toured the United States in the late 1920s and then wrote a scathing attack on America as a civilization constantly being devoured and devalued by advertising and the machinery of publicity. Like Blair, Duhamel saw the flashing lights and incessant movement as a constant assault on the senses. But what Blair soberly theorized as a law or principle at work was for the highly agitated Frenchman the obscenities of a dehumanized and barbarous culture. Reading this European elitist, who was quite taken with his own sense of genius, could exhaust one’s patience. “In the daytime,” he wrote of these monstrous creations of the publicity machine,

the sun makes them powerless, but the night is their own. They have divided among themselves the Kingdom of Darkness. Now here, now there, they begin to awake with the twilight. With the serene persistence of machines, they resume their work of propaganda, of intimidation, in a charivari of light, a riot, a battle, a triumph of disharmony and disorder…. It is the jungle, with all its savagery.⁵²

Beneath the hyperbole was a seminal grasp of the publicity machine’s psychological and sociological impact. “It treats man as if he were the most stupid of the inferior animals,” Duhamel wrote. Moreover, the “flashes, repetitions, and explosions” were the inventions of those who were themselves “apes, who know not what fresh acrobatics to invent to catch the bewildered gaze of the passer-by” and are thus responsible for “titillations” and “burlesque” that resulted in the constant “masturbation of the eye.”⁵³ In the company of his American guide and companion, Duhamel described a visit to a movie theater where people were pushed in and out as part of a continuously moving queue. Even the theater itself, whose “Gargantuan maw,” “imitations of thick Oriental rugs,” and statues on pedestals made of “some plastic and translucent material that seemed intended to remind one of Greek sculpture,” exhibited “the luxury of some big, bourgeois brothel—and industrialized luxury, made by soulless machines for a crowd whose own soul seems to be disappearing.” Everything about the theater and the film struck Duhamel as an imitation of life, to the point where he wondered whether this applied to the moviegoers themselves, a “human multitude that seemed to dream what it saw, and that sometimes stirred unconsciously like a man asleep.” It struck Duhamel that everything around him and including him was false. “I myself was perhaps no longer anything but a simulacrum of a man, an imitation Duhamel.”⁵⁴

Duhamel was deeply agitated by the false universe that advertising had created in the United States but was even more disturbed by what it held for others. America was a grand social “experiment” that showed the rest of the world its future in paradoxical terms, a complex of social interiority increasingly presented in elemental and seductive imagery. Its “supreme virtue” lay in the powers of a “new truth … [that] delights the single-minded and enchants children.” Assessing the American experiment: “All the children whom I know, reason like Americans when it is a question of money, of pleasure, of glory, of power, and of work.”⁵⁵ Duhamel’s harsh treatment of Americans surely stems in part from an old-world European snobbery that generally reads as parody. He titled his book America the Menace because its unthinking, brutish and utterly false existence was beckoning the rest of the world to follow. But he was little inclined to examine the subtle methods that made it possible, the power to persuade and manipulate the public.

DEMOCRACY IN THE MARKETPLACE

As prosperity depended increasingly on rising mass consumption, advertising became more consciously duplicitous. One genre of print ads that flourished during the late 1920s and early 1930s was based on parables intended to convey practical and moral lessons in everyday life. These parables, Roland Marchand tells us, resembled those employed in the Old and New Testaments that aimed to dramatize a central message by means of stark contrasts and exaggeration. But there were basic and consequential differences between the two. For example, Jesus sought to stimulate in his listener the need to rethink decisions and behavior that adversely impacted others and act in a manner that might bring him or her closer to salvation. On the other hand, the parables used by advertisers stressed comfort mainly by conveying that the product was indispensable and could easily be incorporated into one’s daily life. While the former focused on the need for restraint, the latter urged that anything was possible. Here were two fundamentally different ideas about human perfection and how to attain it. When Jesus spoke in parables, the core message was that individual existence amounted to nothing without a deep and abiding concern for the welfare of others. In contrast, advertising came up with parables designed to convince each individual that there were no limits to his or her pleasures.⁵⁶

One of the most effective ads was the parable of the “Democracy of Goods.” Intended as tableaux vivants (living pictures) that highlighted the wonders of mass production and distribution, they aimed to encourage every person to believe that he or she could enjoy society’s most significant pleasure, convenience, or benefit regardless of social standing. In his comprehensive study of American advertising during the interwar period, Marchand discusses one such ad that appeared in the September 1929 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal. The dominant image is a young lad, Livingston Ludlow Biddle, who is identified as the scion of the wealthy and well-known Biddle family of Philadelphia. With the family coat-of-arms visible in one corner of the ad, the future heir to the family fortune is sitting atop a tricycle with an inquiring and endearing look on his face. Below his image are words carefully chosen by the Cream of Wheat Corporation that focus on the importance of diet in the boy’s daily care, as prescribed by “famous specialists.” But the central message of the ad goes further by emphasizing in the clearest terms that this efficacious product need not be enjoyed by the rich alone. As Marchand writes of the ad, “Every mother can give her youngsters the fun and benefits of a Cream of Wheat breakfast just as do the parents of these boys and girls who have the best that wealth can command.”⁵⁷

Regardless of the particular product and its benefit, the parable genre remained a fixture of advertising throughout the period. All ads of this type proclaiming that “any woman can” or “every home can afford” were bent on publicizing the idea that fine products in the marketplace were not the sole pleasures of the wealthy and privileged. Quite the contrary, they were constant reminders that life in America was truly democratic because everything was available to all in the marketplace. Just because a rich family used a particular product did not mean that it could not be used by others beneath them. “By implicitly defining ‘democracy’ in terms of equal access to consumer products,” Marchand says, “and then by depicting the everyday functioning of that ‘democracy’ with regard to one product at a time, these tableaux offered Americans an inviting vision of their society as one of incontestable equality.”⁵⁸

Here perhaps were the powers of persuasion and manipulation at their most sublime. By focusing on one product at a time, advertisers sought to divert attention from the realities of class, power and privilege. The rich and powerful enjoyed any of these products at any time, but this is what the parable was designed to obfuscate. For example, an elegant butler serving Chase and Sanborn Coffee to a wealthy family in a dining room with a high ceiling was intended to remind all who saw it that “compared with the riches of the more fortunate, your way of life may seem modest indeed, yet no one—king, prince, statesman, or capitalist” has any more power to enjoy such fine coffee than a commoner. Another ad for the C. F. Church Manufacturing Company promoted a toilet seat that was “a bathroom luxury everyone can afford.” As the ad stated: “If you lived in one of those palatial apartments on Park Avenue, in New York City, where you have to pay $2,000.00 to $7,500.00 a year rent, you still couldn’t have a better toilet seat in your bathroom than they have—the Church Sani-White Toilet Seat which you can afford to have right now.” As Marchand concluded from both examples, “No discrepancies in wealth could prevent the humblest citizens, provided they chose their purchases wisely, from retiring to a setting in which they could contemplate their essential equality, through possession of an identical product, with the nation’s millionaires.”⁵⁹

For Marchand, the parable of the Democracy of Goods was not a “concerted conspiracy” by advertisers “to impose a social ideology on the American people.” True, it sought to convince the public that “antagonistic envy of the rich was unseemly; programs to redistribute wealth were unnecessary” because “the best things in life were already available to all at reasonable prices.” As such, the most attractive aspect of the parable for advertisers was that it preached “the coming of an equalizing democracy.” Yet the fundamental assumptions of the advertisers themselves were necessarily divisive, and it came out in the parable. On one hand, frequently used terms like “everyone,” “anyone,” “any home,” and the like were aimed at “consumer-citizens” ranked economically by advertisers in the top half of the nation’s population, which amounted to 4 million as opposed to 120 million people. The connection now was between the 400 top families and the 4 million beneath them, the upper echelon of the rising middle class. As Marchand tells us, “The standard antitheses of the Democracy of Goods parables were ‘mansion’ and ‘bungalow.’” But on the other hand, advertising generally ignored anyone who did not live in the cozy confines of the latter. “These millions,” Marchand wrote, “might overhear the promises of consumer democracy in the newspapers or magazines, but advertising leaders felt no obligation to show how their promises to ‘everyone’ would bring equality to those who lived in the nation’s apartment houses and farmhouses without plumbing, let alone those who lived in rural shacks and urban tenements.”⁶⁰

THE BALLYHOO OF CAPITALISTS AND PRESIDENTS

The parable of the Democracy of Goods in advertising was reinforced by powerful sources in American society, even by its presidents. In an address to the American Association of Advertising Agencies in the fall of 1926, Calvin Coolidge asserted that in educating consumers on everything from toothpaste to beautiful clothing, advertisers were cultivating the mind and social graces of consumers in ways that “were harnessing America’s modern industrial system to the uplift of its citizenry.” Coolidge believed this was “molding the human mind” while “ennobling the commercial world.” Bruce Barton’s Jesus called on those around him “to stand upright and look at God face to face” so he could defend family, community, and country. No wonder then that Coolidge defined the work of ad men as nothing short of facilitating “the regeneration and redemption of mankind.”⁶¹

The belief that capitalism was finally delivering its long-standing promise of universal prosperity, and that it was occurring only in democratic America, was deepened by its leading capitalists, who were convinced of their own ballyhoo—a word used to describe the promotion of anything that took on a life bigger than its own through the constant barking and subterfuge of advertising. Prosperity and progress, they claimed, was changing capitalism itself. New principles and laws of capitalist development were now at work. Charles E. Mitchell, president of the National City Bank of New York, declared that “a revolution in industry has been taking place that is raising all classes of the population to a more equal participation in the fruits of industry, and thus, by the natural operation of economic law, bringing to a nearer realization the dreams of those utopians who looked to the day when poverty would be banished.” E. A. Filene, the Boston-based tycoon who pioneered bargain-basement department stores, was ebullient in his praise for the new capitalism making possible “the ever-present human desire for greater total profits [that] will lead to the adoption of new principles.” Andrew Mellon, one of the world’s richest men and treasury secretary for Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, was certain that a new set of economic laws had been established as a result of modern industrial organization governed by efficiency and the “greater diffusion of prosperity among all classes.” Such was the bandwagon of rhapsodies about endless prosperity that rose in a crescendo right up until the crash in October 1929. Only months before that fateful event, two more prophets of capitalist progress had written in another widely read book that “the real industrial leaders of present-day America” had realized that their goal was nothing less than “to make everybody rich.” By recognizing the necessity of paying high wages, industrialists were not only generating prosperity but also signaling that the time was coming when “the rule of class will for the first time in human history utterly disappear.”⁶²

These were weighty pronouncements, made even more influential by the political imprimatur of the Republican Party. As the unrivaled champions of private enterprise and laissez-faire government, Republican leaders promoted the arrival of a New Era of American capitalism, which, they claimed, would benefit everyone, while crafting a political agenda that would make the rich even richer. Certainly, Warren Harding played a leading role. Sailing to victory in 1920 from an electoral landslide and the highest popular vote to date, Harding represented everything big business and finance capital required of its leading New Era front man. According to the historian Michael Parrish, Harding

bore a striking resemblance to Sinclair Lewis’s fictional real estate salesman of 1922, George Babbitt. Like Babbitt, Warren Harding always tried to fit in. He was a swell guy. At the Elks Lodge or Rotary Club in Marion, the state capitol in Columbus, or the Senate cloakroom in Washington, Harding spent his time cultivating friendships, not making enemies. He had slapped many a back, played innumerable games of stud poker, and hoisted his share of cocktails…. He was handsome, charming, convivial, and given to the type of florid oratory—he called it “bloviating”—heard throughout the Midwest on the Fourth of July.⁶³

As Harding’s successor in the White House, Calvin Coolidge well understood the role of effective advertising as the consummate promotion of American business. But he lacked Harding’s personality—it was arguable that he even had one—and seemed doomed when he stepped into the White House. While Harding’s drunkenness, infidelities, and other improprieties earned him a pass among Republican elites, Coolidge was considered a boob. Ferdinand Lundberg recalled one story that typified his general ignorance. According to a Washington correspondent for the New York Evening Post, Clinton W. Gilbert, Coolidge had confided to his advisers just before entering the White House that he had thought all international trade was paid directly by gold bullion—“so much gold for so much merchandise.”⁶⁴ Immortalized by his chief biographer, William Allen White, as the “Puritan in Babylon,” Coolidge’s other claim to fame according to critics was his ability to be “silent in five languages.”⁶⁵

But steeped in his austere and frugal small-town New England ways, Silent Cal, as he was called, surpassed Harding to become “the procurator of capitalist prosperity.”⁶⁶ Oddly enough, this made the seemingly boorish Coolidge one of the great admirers of “advertising ballyhoo,” wrote Silas Bent in 1927, who revealed that Coolidge could communicate his message with the best of experts. Bent recalled a statement Coolidge made that revealed his positive view of it:

It informs the readers of the existence and nature of commodities by explaining the advantages to be derived from their use, and creates for them a wider demand. It is the most potent influence in adopting (adapting?) and changing the habits and modes of life, affecting what we eat, what we wear, and the work and play of the whole nation…. It is not enough that the goods are made; a demand for them must also be made.⁶⁷

Silent Cal well understood the power of ballyhoo. According to Stuart Ewen, Coolidge’s laissez-faire approach to the operations of the government often “rhapsodized on ways that tax cuts and unencumbered assistance to business enterprises” promoted “a state of well-being that reached, without exception, throughout American society.” As Coolidge put it: “This policy has encouraged enterprise, made possible the highest rate of wages which has ever existed, returned large profits, brought to the homes of the people the greatest economic benefits they ever enjoyed, and given to the country as a whole an unexampled era of prosperity.” It was a most concise statement in unqualified support for the idea that American capitalism in the New Era would deliver all the goods to everyone. And it was a message he never tired of repeating, even in his last State of the Union address in December 1928, less than a year from the great crash:

The great wealth created by our enterprise and industry, and saved by our economy, has had the widest distribution among our own people, and has gone out in a steady stream to serve the charity and the business of the world. The requirements of existence have passed beyond the standard of necessity into the region of luxury. Enlarging production is consumed by an increasing demand at home and an expanding commerce abroad. The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.⁶⁸

For Coolidge, the New Capitalism had brought America to the point of universal abundance. He gladly embraced the ballyhoo that made him the most appropriate servant of big capital at the height of prosperity. “In short,” the historian Michael Parrish writes, “Coolidge was an ideal leader for many Americans who wished to explore the new land of materialism and self-indulgence, but who also feared the loss of traditional values.” He served monopoly-capitalist interests just as Harding had but with the greater proficiency required by continued economic expansion. Whatever Coolidge lacked in personality he made up for in the officious way he tended to business. He gave more formal speeches and met reporters more frequently than any president up to that point and proved highly conversant in many topics.⁶⁹

But Republicans had no monopoly on the message. Prosperity was rewarding to corporate leaders who were also leading Democrats. Only months before the crash, Ladies’ Home Journal published an article by John Jacob Raskob, Democratic Party chairman and head of General Motors, titled “Everybody Ought to Be Rich.”⁷⁰

Then again, it was the very aim of advertisers, who generally looked down upon consumers as nothing more than a mob to be manipulated, that familial happiness was not possible without milk from Carnation’s “contented cows,” that women who denied themselves Woodbury soap would lose out on romantic love, or a man was not a man if he was not willing “to walk a mile for a Camel.”⁷¹